


Four Day Interval

by ALC_Punk



Category: NCIS
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-22
Updated: 2009-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-27 00:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ALC_Punk/pseuds/ALC_Punk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abby gets an email once every four days. Set after Aaliyah, and completely jossed once the new season started.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Day Interval

**Author's Note:**

> This ends pretty abruptly.

Abby gets an email once every four days. It's like a weird sort of clockwork, popping up in her in-box with an IPS that tracks back through thirty-three different locations and ends at a dead-end in a pay-by-the-minute kiosk in a Moscow airport.

The first one is brief.

_I am sorry.  
-Z._

Abby doesn't reply to it, too angry at the world for removing part of her family again. She doesn't tell anyone about it, either, and almost deletes it out of spite before something stops her.

For one thing, deleting it wouldn't get rid of it completely, as it's logged in the NCIS database, and Abby doesn't really want to hack down to that level to kill it totally. She also has no plans to take a sledgehammer to her baby or the mainframe itself.

She shoves it into a folder filled with notes about bowling dates and pretends to forget it.

-

Four days later, there's another. This one only slightly less brief.

_I've always hated sand.  
-Z._

This one dead-ends in a bed and breakfast in Italy. Abby wonders a little who taught Ziva to hack like this, then convinces herself she doesn't care. 

It, too, joins messages from Sister Derry about the upcoming bowl-a-thon all-nighter.

-

The third and fourth go un-read, because Abby isn't going to be manipulated like that, dammit.

She shoves them into the folder, jostling a note from Sister Martha letting her know practice is canceled for two weeks. 

Then she stops thinking about them, processing the evidence from a triple homicide that might involve a serial killer or a terrorist. No one is sure until Gibbs has to take the man down, and Tony and McGee are almost tone-deaf when they try their normal banter over her Caf-Pow.

-

_You would like the beauty of the mountains here.  
-Z_

-

When Tony and Ziva and McGee were reassigned the year before, Abby had kept count of the days, tracking them minutely with hash-marks and rants and finger-paints on one of the white walls in her living-room.

She starts marking the days in groups of four.

-

_Things cannot always be undone. I am certain Ducky would be able to tell you who said that.  
-Z_

-

Two months pass before she finally cracks, hitting reply and typing something so full of hurt and anger that she has to delete it before Ziva (or the NCIS servers) can see how maudlin she's being.

Kate would have mocked her gently and said that being maudlin was part of life. 

But she has to say something. Abby is impressed with her own reticence up until now, considers giving herself some sort of reward for holding off this long. 

Her second missive is less angry, but still gets the disappointment and betrayal across.

So she hopes.

-

_There are too many things to be loyal to in this world. It is not so simple as black and white.  
-Z._

"Well, duh," Abby mutters, wanting to swear at the computer screen and the black text on its mocking white background. 

But there'd be no point in pissing off her baby, and there are numbers to crunch and photos to enhance from the latest crime scene, anyway.

McGee shows up five minutes later, Caf-Pow in hand, and leaves empty-handed.

-

It becomes almost a test, then, to see how long she can avoid replying--to keep track of how many places the emails claim Ziva has been.

Abby likes to think of Ziva flying like Superman to get to her destinations, even though it's a stupid idea. Still, the image is enough to prompt her to dig out the first movie and watch it, curled with a pillow and a plate of nachos.

_Loyalty means never lying.  
-A._

-

The end of four days sees Abby in bed with a cold, and she doesn't think about missing her emails until she gets back to work two days later. Clearing her in-box leaves her troubled, but it takes her most of the day to realize why.

She finally finds what she was missing in her spam folder, and curses the new NCIS spam regulations.

-

Her next reply is filled with minutiae about the cats she sees in her morning walks and the dog that lives two doors down. Abby doesn't talk about the rest of the team, doesn't ask how Ziva is or what she's doing. She tells herself she doesn't want to know as she clicks send.

Maybe she should have asked Ziva what new tattoo she should get. 

-

_I miss the rain. I miss bowling and I miss -- but that is something else we are not discussing, is it not?  
-Z_

-

Abby wonders what Gibbs thinks about Ziva's long absence, but Gibbs is never going to talk about things like 'feelings', so it's not something she'll ask. She'll hint and sometimes she'll plead, but she'll never ask. 

Talking to Tony is pointless, he looks like someone punched him in the chest and he's never gotten his breath back. 

Of course McGee is bouncing back and fine. 

She'd like to hate him for that, for his inability to _feel_ Ziva's loss like she does. But she shouldn't expect him to. In the end, Ziva was simply someone they worked with once.

After thinking that, Abby exiles herself to autopsy and steals Ducky's tea while he and Palmer discuss the esoteric meanings in the way men shave from left to right. 

-

Rome, Paris, a tiny shack in Maine bring her more pieces from Ziva. More little sentences that could mean nothing and could mean everything. 

Abby turns them into a word puzzle at three in the morning on a child kidnaping case, her brain exhausted from running so many tests that even General Mass Spec has folded his cards for the night leaving her cross-legged on the floor, a laptop hooked into the machines on her bench.

Word soup gives her no new insights into Ziva, but she remembers to reply, finally.

She talks about bowling, the tale of Sister Magdalena's triple word score using 'vagina' and ends with something she regrets after hitting send. 

_Maybe if you asked real nice, you could stop missing rain and dogs.  
-A_

-

Four days, like clockwork.

_There are things we cannot ask. Sister Magdalena is a woman after my own heart.  
-Z_

"Bullshit," Abby says to the email. She types angrily, but doesn't hit send, distracted by the phone ringing. 

By the time she's done explaining the chain of evidence in their last case to Director Vance, her anger is gone. She can't find the email, though, and hopes she didn't hit send at some point.

-

_Something is wrong, I've been_

Two days since the last missive, and no signature. 

"Been what? Stupid? Annoyed? Wet? Tired?" Abby finds she doesn't care. There's another murder in her lap and Gibbs is breathing down her neck every thirty minutes, with Vance taking the fifteen-minute spots. 

She doesn't have time for cryptic messages from Mossad officers who got their asses kicked out of NCIS.

-

Two days later, and there's nothing in her email from an obscure town in Norway. Abby finds her angry reply in the draft folder and deletes it. 

She doesn't have time to worry about it, fingerprints, DNA, and a gun to check for ballistics are going to take up the rest of her day--as long as McGee stops hovering and asking stupid questions (she sends him to Tony for instruction).

-

Six days since the cryptic message. Eight since the last normal, like clockwork one. 

Abby doesn't want to think about what that could mean. 

The night is spent drowning her worries in ice cream and re-runs of MASH until she's curled in a ball under her covers, wondering when her life devolved to this. 

She makes a decision to write another dissertation on the uses of light in digital reproductions and drops off, forgetting to brush her teeth.

-

A lot can happen to a human woman in a week.

-

"McGee, I need you to do something for me."

"Sure, Abs," he was smiling. McGee was always smiling at her, like he still thought of her like something other than just a friend. 

"I need you to hack into Mossad's database and find out where Ziva is," Abby says, hands waving as she tried to keep her voice down so as not to attract anymore attention in the cafeteria than she already had in arriving there. "I know, I know it isn't easy, and I know we have no jurisdiction. And I can't tell you why, I just need you to do it."

"Abby, you know--"

"Do it, Timothy." 

There is something in her voice that convinces him, his eyes going blank for an instant before he nods, "All right. I'll try."

"Never try, young padawan. Do or do not, there is no try."

-

"Abby."

Twelve days. Ten since that aborted message which now feels entirely too menacing.

McGee is whispering like he expects Gibbs to appear at any moment and smack him for doing something wrong.

"What?" She doesn't bother whispering. Gibbs isn't even in the office; he and Tony went out after a suspect. 

"You're not gonna like it."

He was still whispering, "I don't like sibilants, either, McGee, but you don't see me shooting you. Spill."

"According to--you know--Ziva's listed as..." he fails to continue, as though he can't. Maybe Abby should shoot him. She's heard pain can loosen a man's tongue. 

"McGee--"

"Killed in action," he blurts. "Ziva's dead, Abby."

-

There is no way Ziva's dead. Not in a million years. Abby would know. She would feel it, like she felt Kate go, and the director. She tries to convince herself of that as she stumbles through the rest of the day in a haze, trying to decide what to do. Someone would have told them, right? Someone would have felt the need to rub NCIS' nose in the fact that they'd let Ziva die on foreign soil--and Abby doesn't even feel the urge to consider the irony that she thinks of Ziva as more American than Israeli now. As though being a part of the team changed her nationality like Tony snapping his fingers. 

So if Ziva isn't dead, someone wants the world to think she is. 

And Abby's got a short list of suspects for that; Director Vance tops the list, but he hasn't been anymore smug than normal. Abby doesn't think she could manage an excuse to contact the Director of Mossad on such short notice. 

Next best thing, then.

-

"Gibbs. I think something's happened to Ziva."


End file.
